Resistance

by Owen Sheers

How can I not have review this when I read it?  It’s a book I feel inclined to recommend to my book group, and it was certainly a good read at the time (whichever time that was… I think I read it after I Saw a Man, though it was written several years earlier).

The book was recommended to me by the owner/manager at my nearest independent bookshop, Alison’s of Tewkesbury, a few years ago.  He is also an avid poetry reader, so it was not surprising that he knew Owen Sheers’ work.  I bought the paperback without hesitation, and read it some time later.

The story is set in the borderlands between England and Wales in the Brecon Beacons – the same Black Hills that feature in one of my favourite Bruce Chatwin books, On the Black Hill.  The local community, isolated and self-contained, finds itself playing host to a small band of German soldiers, part of an occupying force after the imagined German invasion of Britain in 1944.

The book is a thriller, an exploration of human nature, and at the same time a lyrical exposition of a landscape and community in an area that I too have learned to love.

Not sure when I read this, but I am posting in July 2021 and – maybe – I will read it again, before recommending it to my book group.

Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War

by Max Hastings

My brother Mark gave me this book in paperback two years ago, having bought himself the hardback copy.  I find long books (in this case 700+ pages plus photographs) a bit hard to manipulate in physical form, so I recently decided to download the audiobook, referring to the paperback only for maps, photos and the glossary.

Hastings is an engaging writer whose detailed research, perceptive analysis and interpretation of the people and events he describes have kept me involved.  The story narrated here happened almost entirely in my lifetime: I was born in 1956, some ten years after Giap and Ho began to fight for an independent Vietnam, and I came of age around the time that the US withdrew its last troops and diplomats from Saigon.  The US / Vietnamese war was the backdrop to the US youth culture of the early 1970s in which, as a British teenager, I was immersed.  So I was motivated to learn more.

I’m not sure I can say much more about the book itself – and to write more about Vietnam, I can hardly do better than refer anyone who reads this ‘review’ to Hastings’ book.  The praise for this work is richly deserved, in my view.

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I listened to the rest of this book and finally finished the audiobook in early August 2021.  The sections about people and politics interested me more than the narrative of military tactics or types and sizes of weapons used – although the discussion about the development of the M-16 automatic rifle and its advantages vs defects as compared to the Kalashnikov was fascinating and terrifying.

This is a gruesomely compelling topic, well told and expertly narrated.